Existing Twitter clients are build based on past Twitter user experience. Past Twitter is the service where real people tweet their activities. There were less companies, brands, and idols using it as one of the marketing tool. People used it merely to express themselves and engage with their friends.

Twitter has entered a phase where it’s no longer only about self expression and social engagement. Following is no longer for the people you find interesting. It can also serve as an aggregator. It can also serve as a bookmarking services. It can take many forms thus developers can build many types of Twitter client from different approach.

How I Use Twitter

The way I’m using Twitter client is no longer similar to how I used Twitter one year ago. In the past, I followed everything. Blogs, people, friends, all of them are under one huge list known as the people I follow. It was a mess. I was very selective in choosing the people I follow, but of course the huge timeline was still a problem.

With the list feature, I can unfollow everyone and list everyone under several categories. Want to know what your fellow designers have been doing? Make a list. Want to know the latest Apple news? Make a list. Want to know what your friends been up to? Make a list. So there are many promotion from your favorite companies? Make a list.

Unless you need the direct message service, you can choose not to follow anyone. We’re no longer need to add everyone into the list known as “People I follow” just to get their updates.

But, there is no Twitter client that make use of the list well. Be it on desktop or mobile device, the existing apps still follow the same old user experience. We’re stuck with the timeline. The timeline and list are separated.

I need a Twitter client that can leverage list feature into the timeline.

My Twitter Client

I’ve been trying to come up with my own personal Twitter client. A Twitter client I think will satisfy my needs. I’ve even tried to write my own Twitter client two weeks ago which doesn’t yield any result yet. But I hope this post will let developers know what I want personally.

Timeline is made up from list. The people I follow are under one abstract list. This timeline can let you toggle the list you follow and display all of them in the timeline. If I follow 10 lists, I can choose which list will appear in my timeline. The reason why I think this approach works is because I only want 2 out of 10 list I follow to appear in my timeline.

Bundle List to let me bundle several lists together. You can call it categories, or groups. But the main point of this feature is to let you bundle lists together and display them under the similar form to the main timeline where you can toggle lists.

Bundle Search is using the same concept. You save the keywords and you can view them under one timeline. If you save two keywords such as Apple and Microsoft. Turning them on will display a timeline with related keywords in it. In another word, you combine Apple search result with Microsoft search result into one timeline.

Realization

Can all the features above be done? While I can’t say for sure how developers will handle the duplicate tweets. The features can be implemented. It doesn’t break the existing Twitter client user experience, but instead adding another layer, I think, is very useful to Twitter power user.

This is just a concept I have by considering my habit using Twitter from the standpoint of regular user.

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